HyperCard Zine
crime.team
crime.team
This was before the internet, so my only source of docs and help was my copy old hand-me-down copy of The HyperCard Bible I got from a family friend.
I had no idea about data structures or anything, so I reinvented so many of them trying to make my games. I would create a field, make it really tiny, and then stick it way in the corner behind a button and use that as my data storage.
Hypercard hints at the kind of elegance that's possible when there isn't such a strict divide between the computer programmer and the computer user. We live in a world that went the complete opposite direction from this. So instead of being able to copy and paste the Bold button from Word and use it anywhere else in my system, or — gasp! — alt-click on it to change what it does, I have to learn a full programming stack to add new features to my own computer.
The thinking behind it is due for a comeback
I'm personally fond of Malbolge with Rust-bindings, but that's not quite as popular as React yet.
I still remember the moment I figured out I could compare positions with if to make make an enemy follow you around the screen. I felt like a god!
In a related talk, Atkinson finally came out and said that the idea for Hypercard came to him during an acid trip on a park bench.
At the time that I wrote this, I had never taken any programming courses. I didn't even have any programming books. I was about 15 and entirely self-taught from reading the source code to other people's HyperCard stacks, so the code quality is probably terrible.
It is very strange to find out that someone else remembers a stupid project I did as a teenager 23 years ago.
I remember a few names because I was 12 and wanted to be like the cool kids in ElectroSoft. My memory of your exact screen name was refreshed when I stumbled across LightHouse on archive.org a few months ago.
I desperately wish it were still real, for my kids. I think it'd be far be the best way to get them coding.
Otherwise, sit down and contemplate the fact that what has been built once could probably be built again."
Of course HC was many things to many people. The modern replacement could be identified by what people actually use in daily life for simple programming and databases: Excel.
I wrote an assembler in HC.
Pricey, mind!
Aside from the blatant identity politics of this "crime.team" site, it seems to be about the site creator trying to sell other people's submitted work for free.
> By submitting your stack, you are giving me permission to sell your stack as part of HyperCard Zine. I ask that, if your stack is published as part of HyperCard Zine, please wait at least a year after publication to sell it on your own.
Hard pass.
If this were a poetry journal that seeks contributions from young male writers, I don't think anyone would call it "blatant identity politics". Somehow women doing creative things on a computer get treated particularly harshly.
That is exactly identity politics...
If that's the game they want to play then fine, but call a spade a spade here.
… Just above the section you quote:
"All artists who end up in the final copy will get an equal cut of the revenue made from selling the collection."
Yeah, it sucks that you couldn't sell the stack you submit on your own for a year, but isn't almost always that the case for freelance work? When you're a freelance journalist, surely your client buys the right to publish your story exclusively for some period of time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865263
>The coolest thing somebody did with WebStar was to integrate it with HyperCard so you could actually publish live INTERACTIVE HyperCard stacks on the web, that you could see as images you could click on to follow links, and followed by html form elements corresponding to the text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, drop down menus, scrolling lists, etc in the HyperCard stack that you could use in the browser to interactive with live HyperCard pages!
>That was the earliest easiest way that non-programmers and even kids could both not just create graphical web pages, but publish live interactive apps on the web!
http://aaa-proteins.uni-graz.at/HyperCGI.html
http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/1...
HyperCard introduced me to programming, and I'd love to read/edit stacks for purposes of nostalgia. How do people read/edit stacks these days? Preferably on modern hardware/OSes--I don't have an old-school Mac any more.
More info here: https://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-on-the-archive...
Lots of interesting similarities to the two.
Edit: Are there any companies I could hire to do that for me?
What an odd thing to say about it. Handwriting, too, has been used by LGBT and other marginalised people to make art representing their experiences. HyperCard has no doubt been used by mainstream people to make interactive art representing their experiences. HyperCard has no doubt been used by marginalised and mainstream people to make business applications.
HyperCard was really neat technology, regardless of who was using it at the time. It enabled some neat stacks, with a pretty neat visual æsthetic.
Nonetheless, yes, when she puts a line like that above the fold, one can't help but assume what she's really going for here is HyperCard stacks specifically relevant to the LGBT experience (what a weird sentence to type this morning). A niche audience within a niche audience. But I guess that's something the internet is great at serving.
Why assume? It says so right there on the page:
"I'm especially interested in seeing work from LGBT people, POC, and other marginalized groups, but everyone is welcome to submit a stack!"
I don't really understand why this would upset anyone. Curated compilations are common in every medium. Of course the curator will prefer to choose content that has a common theme.
If they had wide appeal, they wouldn't be zines!
https://archive.org/details/hypercard_caper-in-the-castro
> Programmed by CM Ralph (https://cmralph.com/) in 1989, Caper in the Castro is likely the first LGBT game. It was distributed via BBS, and is 'Charityware', with the designer asking players to donate to the AIDS Charity of their choice.